I applied and was asked by a recruiter to consider a position as “trading system devops engineer”. could anyone give me more insight about the position? Couldn’t find much about it and the job description didn’t really say much about what I really need to know to be successful at the job.
I can't say about Jane Street but devops in trading is one of the more stressful roles, in firms that are already on average more stressful than your average FAANG. There are firms that value devops highly, ours is one of them. The work is generally about monitoring, first-in-line firefighting, certain types of system improvements (usually through well-established means) and various day to day operational work that are automated as much as possible. The valuable traits are the ability to make level-headed decisions quickly, the ability to navigate complexity, and a strong work ethic. There's not much need to be very creative on the job, but there's still value in being smart. The "hard" skills you develop would be better for syseng rather than SWE, but devops is not syseng and can be involved in many business-level decision making because they're more involved in the specific business domain needs. It can feel like a lot of unglamorous grunt work (with some interesting bits here and there), but a good devops engineer is well-respected and highly valued.
Would such position be paid less than the actual developers at a trading firm?
I believe there's a lower ceiling (that even most developers don't hit) due to the nature of the work. Junior hiring is less competitive so the starting pay might reflect that too. I don't sense there's otherwise a significant difference, but I'm not HR. To illustrate, there's been pretty good representation of devops in general management roles, but our group of highest-level technical staff consists mostly of developers. We also have a technical ladder with some solid people that I believe isn't paid less than people on the management ladder. But an exceptional trading systems / core infra developer stands out much more than an exceptional devops engineer. In case someone's interested, in recruiting we call it Core Operations Engineer.